On view February 23, 2023 through June 4, 2023
Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love features more than 45 paintings and works on paper made between 2019 and 2022, that weave together motifs found in historical paintings with recognizable 21st-century moments to create new worlds based in Toor’s imagination. The exhibition captures the ways in which Toor engages with art history to center brown, queer figures and to challenge enshrined notions of power and sexuality.
Toor (Pakistani, b. 1983) lives and works in New York City, but grew up in Lahore, his birthplace in Pakistan. Shaped by these viewpoints, Toor’s artistic practice explores his hopes and anxieties about the queer experience in both his ancestral and adopted countries. Throughout his work, Toor blurs sensual pleasure with satire and mines his deep knowledge of the European, American, and South Asian painterly tradition.
This exhibition is organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art
Presenting Sponsor of No Ordinary Love: Life On Canvas
About Salman Toor
Salman Toor (born in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1983) currently lives and works in New York. His first institutional solo exhibition, Salman Toor: How Will I Know, was recently presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2020-2021). Toor’s work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions and projects, including Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters at Frick Madison, New York, NY, and others held at the RISD Museum, Providence, RI; the Public Art Fund, New York, NY; Phi Foundation for Contemporary Art, Montréal, Canada; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; Lahore Biennale 2018, Pakistan; and the 2016 Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India. Toor is the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, and his work is in many public collections. Toor’s work will be presented in the forthcoming Lyon Biennial, and his first solo exhibition in China opened at M Woods in Beijing.